ABSTRACT
A number of emerging historiographical trends have posed challenges to writing cultural and art history within an exclusively national framework and the dominant Western paradigm that is preoccupied with the European core and a progressive linear developmental model. New Art History took a socially oriented critical turn in an effort to account also for the realities of the social world in which art is created. Although exploring intercultural connections or the circulation of images, styles, and aesthetics is an axiom of art historical research, from the nineteenth century until the postwar period, art historiography tended to take the national container as a usual unit of its narratives. The Habsburg Monarchy, while not a colonial power itself, likewise promoted national diversity inside its political borders as an asset, and conveyed a state image in which the empire guaranteed to each of its constituent nations the best possible conditions of development—masking, of course, very real disadvantages.
